Teaching & Research

Batavia Health is dedicated to training the next generation of doctors.

The practice has been involved in teaching registrars, interns, medical students and student nurses from its inception. With a diverse range of patients and conditions, we believe that we offer a rich and unique learning experience.

Research:

2017 Familial Hypercholeserolaemia

Following the pilot cascade screening program run at the Royal Perth Hospital, we are testing different approaches to identifying families with FH in the South West of WA.

Methods

We are testing the feasibility and relative success of a range of approaches to identifying families with possible FH through interrogating general practice records, pathology records, admissions to coronary care units and workplace screening questionnaires.

The study is being run jointly from the Rural Clinical School of WA offices in Bunbury and the discipline of General Practice in Perth, and also involves working with general practices and regional and metropolitan hospitals.

Home Medicine Reviews – 2010

Dr James Quirke from Batavia Health in Geraldton feels remuneration is below the value of the work involved.

Dr James Quirke isn’t glowing about the bureaucracy involved, but he says MMRs are for top echelon GPs happy to work in with the local pharmacist.

“The program had effectively set up good communication links between pharmacists and general practitioners, with ongoing meetings, collaborative events, etc. – a framework for addressing local issues, indirectly,” he said, adding that the return on expenditure was arguable but some resurrection under the proposed PHCOs might reverse this.

We asked him if MMRs were just a fix for doctors too busy to take a decent medication history and write out a list for their patients?

“No, the doctors who actually use the HMR’s tend to be very much up with the play and can see the benefits of a home medication review,” he responded. “They view it often as getting another professional to look at the prescribing from a pharmacological angle.”

MMRs were about responding to the problems that go with polypharmacy, rather than problems with generics, he said. Home (“domiciliary”) review of medications beats all comers when it comes to defining compliance, viewing the impact of the home situation and dynamics, and establishing a good line of communication between the GP and pharmacist that prevents patient misunderstandings.

And HMRs were most certainly not about empire building for pharmacists, in health consulting.

“On the contrary, The registration of pharmacists was quite a difficult process and they appear so heavily bogged down in the retail side of pharmacy to stay viable that they are reluctant to get involved in time consuming and costly home visits,” he explained.

“Most of what the government is offering the pharmacists is a poison chalice – grossly underfunded with significant medico-legal implications, and designed to patronise pharmacists and antagonise family practitioners!”